


all along there was some invisible string (tying you to me)

by always_a_queen



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Jack Dalton is Riley Davis' Parent, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26551684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/always_a_queen/pseuds/always_a_queen
Summary: Riley first notices the soulmark on her right thigh when she’s seven./a MacRiley Soulmate AU
Relationships: Riley Davis/Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 185





	all along there was some invisible string (tying you to me)

**Author's Note:**

> I’m playing a little fast and loose with the canon timeline here. I don’t really care. Some of this is sappy. I think if you’re not writing a somewhat sappy soulmate au you’re probably doing it wrong, but that’s just my take on things.
> 
> The sequel to the [ intertwined series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1815883) is still happening, I just got a little distracted and let this fic eat my brain for four days.

* * *

Riley first notices the soulmark on her right thigh when she’s seven. It’s three symbols, one right after the other. The first one is a bow and arrow. It’s a simple design: the capital D-shape of the bow with a solid line through it, the end tipped with a tiny v of an arrowhead. The middle icon is an eight. It’s lying on its side. The last one is the outline of a shield with a tiny plus-sign inside.

It honestly doesn’t make any sense to her. Maybe her soulmate likes archery? Maybe they’re a knight? Does that make her the flopped-over eight? It doesn’t make any sense.

She gives up trying to figure it out. Sometimes people get nonsense for their soulmarks. That must be what hers is. She never shows it to her mom, but she’s sure her mother notices. They never talk about it though.

Her mom doesn’t have a soulmark. Only about 8% of the population gets them. Riley is somehow in that 8%.

That scares her, a little, that there’s someone out there for her, someone perfect for her in every way. Her match.

What if she’s a disappointment to them? Like her dad was to her mom. Not that her parents were soulmates, but still. Even parents who aren’t soulmates don’t hit each other when they fight. Even parents who aren't soulmates don't make each other cry. Riley’s pretty sure about that.

She keeps her soulmark quiet. She doesn’t wear short shorts, and if she goes swimming she puts a bandage on over it. It’s easy enough to hide that way. 

Of course, Jack sees it one day when she’s thirteen. It’s totally by accident. She’s coming back from the pool and the bandage is about to flop off, so she peels it away and tosses it in the kitchen trash just as Jack pops into the kitchen with an empty can of Pepsi.

For some reason, Jack Dalton doesn’t drink beer in their apartment. Riley likes that about him. It’s like he has a sixth sense about it. She’s seen him order it when out at a restaurant, but he never comes home with a six pack, or anything else with alcohol. Used to be her dad only ever drank beer at home. No water, no soda, just beer. Riley learned that by his third one, she needed to stay far, far away.

“You’re back,” he says, “Wanna go play some skeeball?”

“Sure,” she says, and that’s when she sees his eyebrows raise.

They talk about it over greasy pizza. “Your mom know?” Jack asks.

Riley shrugs. “I guess,” she says. “I don’t know. We don’t talk about it.”

“Well,” he tries, “What do you think about it?”

Riley taps her fingers on the denim of her shorts, right above the mark. “I think it’s kind of cool, knowing that somewhere, someone’s out there for me.”

“Yeah,” Jack says, before taking another huge bite of his pizza. He talks around the mouthful as he says, “That’s gotta be pretty sweet.”

“You don’t have one?” Riley asks. She’s pretty sure he doesn’t. He’s amazing, and he wouldn’t be dating her mom if his soulmate was out there. She’s almost positive. He’s not the type.

“Nah.” Jack shakes his head. “I gotta figure it all out the old fashioned way. I’m a little jealous. Do you know what it means?”

Riley sketches it out on a napkin for him, the three symbols she’s long ago memorized. Jack just makes a face. “Yeah, figuring that stuff out isn’t my thing, kid. Maybe your soulmate is a hunter or something.”

“Maybe,” Riley agrees.

* * *

High School Algebra convinces her pretty positively that the middle symbol is actually _infinity_ , which makes Riley pretty sure that the symbols to the left and right represent her and her soulmate. Though what she has in common with either a shield or archery is beyond her. Maybe the universe just screwed up?

Riley dates a few people in high school, but when they clearly don’t have her soulmark, or even _a_ soulmark, she gives up. Her soulmate is out there somewhere, and she’s not going to waste her time. She’s going to find them.

Her first hacking gig is a soulmark finding service, because she doesn’t have the $120 for the subscription, and she just wants to _know_. Her match comes up empty. No one with similar markings has registered their soulmark with this company. She sorts through image after image where the keywords given were eight, infinity, cross, shield, arrow, or bow, and finds lots of soulmarks, but there’s nothing that matches with hers.

Maybe, she wonders, her soulmate is out there and they’re just not trying to find her?

And if they’re not trying to find her, why is she still looking for them? She sets aside her curiosity. She has a few meaningless flings, a boyfriend here, a girlfriend there, but at the end of the day nothing gets serious because she knows nothing is going to get serious.

She gets a few more tattoos, one on her back and one on her shoulder, which kind of hides the fact that she’s also got the soulmark on her thigh. People still notice, because it is an odd collection of symbols, but Riley just tells them she doesn’t want to talk about her tattoos, and they leave it be. Although, there’s this one girl who takes one look at it, and says “You’re marked. You didn’t tell me you were marked.” And Riley never hears from her again.

When she starts to get noticed for her hacking skills, Riley picks the name _Artemis37_ because it sounds cool. All Riley really remembers is that Artemis is a greek goddess. It’s totally by accident that she googles it one night.

Artemis is a huntress.

Huh.

That probably makes her the bow and arrow. That also probably means her soulmate is probably the shield and cross.

* * *

Jack figures it out. They’re on a mission, and Mac gets hit with some drug in powder form. He’s racing to get all his clothes off while Jack shoves him into the nearest shower, when Jack spies it high on his right thigh.

And since neither Jack’s head nor Jack’s heart have forgotten one Riley Davis, he connects the two immediately.

This is her soulmate.

Mac. Blonde haired, sleeping-with-Nikki, “improvise everything” Angus MacGyver is the soulmate of the little girl Jack still hates himself for leaving. The little girl who told him he was the first she’d ever talked to about her soulmate.

He’s _Riley’s_ soulmate. Sweet mercy, that makes perfect sense.

It’s almost enough to make Jack want to reach out again. Send Riley another letter. Try to get on her approved visitor list again.

But she’s currently serving a five year sentence for her extracurricular hacking and even if she wasn’t, Jack knows she won’t read anything he mails her and she won’t see him. So what is there to do?

Tell Mac? That would be a fun conversation: “Hey, buddy, stop screwing Nikki because I know who your soulmate is and she’s in prison.”

Nope. That won’t work.

Out of options, Jack just sort of shrugs his shoulders and tells the universe to figure it out by itself.

The universe does. Nikki dies on an operation gone bad. Which, to be fair, pisses Jack off a _lot_. There was no need for Nikki to die. Riley and Mac could still have met.

But it does create an opening, an opportunity, and Jack can’t resist helping Riley _and_ Mac at the same time. Plus, by now he’s sort of invested in seeing how this plays out.

And it plays out better than he could have imagined. Suddenly Mac is picking the lock on Riley’s handcuffs and dragging her out of prison. Riley still won’t acknowledge Jack, but even though he needles her about it, Jack’s more preoccupied watching Mac and Riley together.

Neither of them knows, and neither is going to notice, unless for some reason Jack can figure out an excuse to get everyone to strip down to their underwear. Deadly powdered substances might work, but Nikki’s death is so fresh for Mac, and it’s still undecided if Riley’s going back to prison after all of this, so Jack bites his tongue and waits to see what else the universe has up its sleeve.

Of course, then Nikki _isn’t actually dead_ , and her relationship with Mac is complicated. For a while Jack thinks maybe it’s best that Riley doesn’t know. Especially when it turns out that Phoenix does have the pull to reduce her sentence and employ her full time.

Well, Jack thinks to himself smugly, now the universe has _plenty_ of opportunities to help them figure it out.

* * *

It takes the universe a year and a half. 

Jack’s come close to telling both of them more than once, but every time he holds his tongue. Maybe they know. Maybe they’ve known from the start. Mac and Riley clicked together as partners seamlessly. They figure out each other’s moves like they’ve worked together for decades.

Some days Jack thinks that surely they _must_ know, but then Riley mentions a boyfriend here and there, and Mac dates a few women, and Jack realizes again that they don’t. They couldn’t.

Because if they knew, would they be dancing around it like this? Wouldn’t things be awkward? Wouldn’t one of them have told Jack? It doesn’t make any sense.

Jack wants to drop hints. Wants to shove Mac’s Swiss army knife in Riley’s face and point at the little white shield set against the red and ask her if it seems familiar. He wants to ask Mac if he knows Artemis was a huntress who used a bow and arrow or if Mac has thought at all about the fact that _Artemis37_ was Riley’s hacker name.

And yet. He doesn’t.

Maybe he trusts the universe. Maybe he just trusts Mac and Riley. He’s not sure.

* * *

Mac sees it completely by accident. They’re undercover in Miami, milling around an outdoor bar and pool, and Riley’s dressed in a one-piece suit with oval cutouts around her waist. It’s paired with a white wrap-around skirt, tied off on her right hip.

It’s only when she sits down on the barstool next to him that the skirt exposes the length of her thigh.

Mac’s seen at least two of Riley’s tattoos before, so he knows she has them. He’s seen the one on her shoulder a couple of times, same for the one on her upper back. A fancy party, a tight fitting dress...

...but Mac doesn’t think he’s ever seen the one on her thigh. Well, he knows he hasn’t. He would have noticed. It’s _exactly_ like his. In the exact same place. He would have noticed.

His throat goes dry. For a second he can’t even breathe. It’s Riley.

It’s _Riley_.

The whole world seems to tilt wildly on its axis, but at the same time, everything suddenly makes sense.

Of _course_ it’s Riley. As soon as that reality clicks into place, Mac can’t even imagine it being anyone else.

“Mac,” Riley says slowly, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, dragging his gaze away from her thigh. She doesn’t know. Of course she doesn’t know. If she knew she would have… well, Mac isn’t sure what she would have done. Said something? Probably.

She certainly wouldn’t be making eyes at Billy. At least he doesn’t think so?

“You sure?” she asks. “You don’t look so good.”

He swallows, trying to bring his mind back to the mission, back to reality. He can figure this all out later.

“I’m good,” he says, and he tries to mean it.

* * *

“You _knew_ ,” Mac says, the moment he sees Jack next. Jack’s sitting on a bench in a Phoenix locker room, digging through one of his overnight bags.

“Knew what?” Jack says, but Mac can see the truth on his face.

“You knew Riley has a soulmark.”

Feigning nonchalance, Jack shrugs. “So?”

“You knew hers matched _mine_ ,” Mac clarifies, not unkindly, but with firmness.

“Yeah,” Jack says, rotating his jaw. “I did. I knew that.”

Mac stares at his partner. “And you didn’t tell me? You didn’t tell her?”

“I figured you’d figure it out,” Jack says. “And you did.”

Mac’s jaw drops. “You just… you left it for us to figure out?”

Another shrug. Mac is not a violent person, but he’d like to hit Jack with something. “And she doesn’t know?”

“I don’t know, man,” Jack says. “I don’t think so. You’re the only one who’s said anything to me about it. You’re the one who pointed out that she liked Billy.”

All of the fight leaves him at once. Deflated, Mac sits at the other end of the bench.

“So,” Jack purses his lips. “What are you going to do?”

Mac shakes his head slowly. Riley is dating Billy. His soulmate is dating someone else. It makes him feel sick.

“I have absolutely no idea.”

* * *

Riley dates Billy for several months before he sees her soulmark. They’re making out on his couch when he lifts up her skirt, and his eyes land on the three symbols.

“Riley?” he asks, tracing his forefinger along the dark pattern on her skin. “This isn’t a tattoo.”

She swallows. “No,” she agrees, “It’s not.”

“Riley,” he says, and his voice sounds so broken, in a way that tells her he doesn’t have one. But he’d hoped she didn’t have one.

Riley leaves his apartment ten minutes later, wiping at her tears with the back of her hand. There’s nothing more to say or do. She has a soulmate. She had hoped, with what she thinks was her whole heart, that it was Billy.

It wasn’t.

She climbs into her car and contemplates her next steps. Part of her wants to go home. Part of her wants to run to Jack, but Jack’s gone.

The next person, obviously, is Mac. It doesn’t even take a conscious decision on Riley’s part to start driving to his house. She’s been there so many times that the route feels more familiar than her own apartment.

She does pull over into a gas station parking lot when her tears make it hard to see, and sends him a text. _Broke it off with Billy. On my way over._

He texts her back: _I’ve got beer in the fridge and Ben & Jerry’s in the freezer. _

“What happened?” Mac asks, when he pulls open the front door.

There are still tears streaming down her cheeks, and without a word she throws herself forward into his arms. “I need to tell you something,” she cries into his shirt. “I need to tell you something right now.”

“Okay,” Mac says gently, “Okay, come in and sit down. I have a fire going.”

He leads her outside and takes a seat beside her on the wood bench. The fire crackles in the fire-pit. It’s settled down to mostly coals, and the warmth of it wraps around Riley like a blanket. Mac leaves her for a moment, but it’s only to get her a box of tissues and a glass of water. 

Mac doesn’t say anything for a while. He wraps his arm around her shoulders and lets her cry. When she’s finished up the initial burst of tears, he asks, “What did you want to tell me, Riles?”

“I—I have a soulmark, Mac,” she whispers. “And Billy saw it, and he doesn’t have one, and it’s over.”

And then she bursts into a fresh round of tears. Mac wraps his arms around her and holds her tight.

“You probably don’t even believe in those things,” Riley says. “But I have one, and I do, and I was thinking, maybe, finally, it was Billy.”

He rubs her back gently. “I’m sorry, Riles.”

She pulls away, then and tugs the hem of her skirt up her thigh, revealing the mark. “Here,” she says.

Mac stares at it. Almost unconsciously, he reaches over to touch it. Riley shivers at the contact. Mac pulls his hand back. “I’m sorry,” he says quickly. “I’ve just… never seen…”

She smiles a little. There is something kind of magnetic about it. Something alluring. Of course, most people who look at it are just upset that Riley isn’t their soulmate, but she doesn’t get that from Mac at all. Instead, he looks curious, intrigued.

And of course he is. Only 8% of the population has a soulmark. Maybe he’s never met someone with one before.

“You’re wrong,” he says, and she notices that his voice sounds a little strained. “I do believe in them. I have since I was little.”

She tilts her head. “Really? Why?”

Maybe he’s science-d the shit out of it and found some actual proof of why these things exist or something. Maybe he knows how to find her actual soulmate, maybe…

“I have one.”

That is _so_ not the answer she was expecting. Riley blinks in shock. “You have one. Where?”

She’s seen, well, quite a bit of Mac’s body over the course of their time working at Phoenix together. She’s seen him shirtless, and she’s seen him in his underwear that one time their cover involved handcuffing him to the bed...

“Yeah,” Mac says softly. “On, uh, on my right thigh.”

That’s super weird. Riley tries to think back to that handcuff operation. She was too busy taking care of the guard’s keycard to really pay attention to Mac, and she can’t quite picture it. “Can I see it?”

He hesitates, but she says, “C’mon, Mac, I showed you mine.”

With a sigh, Mac stands up. “It’s not exactly in the most convenient spot…”

She raises her eyebrows. “Okay?”

He makes a vague gesture to his upper legs, and she gets it. She at least has the benefit of being able to casually lift up a skirt. Pants are a little trickier. “Oh,” she says quickly.

“Still want to see?” he asks.

She nods. She’s never actually seen anybody’s soulmark before.

He flicks open the button of his jeans, tugs them down just a little and…

There. Right below the hem of his black boxer briefs. Three symbols.

A bow and arrow.

A sideways eight.

And a shield with a cross inside it.

Riley’s heart leaps into her throat, head spinning with the implications. He’s her soulmate. Her _soulmate_ . It’s not _her_ soulmark anymore, it’s _their_ soulmark. Hers and Macs.

She looks up at him, and it makes all the sense in the world. It’s right. Completely right. 

Mac zips up his jeans and tucks the button back through the loop. “Riles,” he says, but she’s on her feet and her arms are around him, hugging him tight.

“It’s _you_ ,” she tells him. His arms surround her, and it feels like coming home. “Of _course_ it’s you. How could it ever have been anyone else?”

He breathes out a long sigh. “You’re happy?”

She leans back to look him in the eyes. “You are everything my heart never knew it wanted.”

God, who knew finding her soulmate would turn her into such a sap. Mac doesn’t seem to mind though.

He leans forward to kiss her, soft and slow and everything she’s imagined kissing Mac would be like. She’s imagined it, of course, just never like this. Never with him fitting against the jagged edges of her soul like the perfect missing piece.

And then she’s crying some more. Not because she’s lost, but because she’s found.

* * *

They just make out the first night, which is fine with Riley because everything with Billy is still fresh, and all her emotions feel pretty topsy turvy. She does spend the night, though, cuddled against Mac’s chest. She thinks in the morning that despite the slight crick in her neck, it was the best sleep of her life.

They carpool into work together and nobody notices. They take lunch together and no one seems to care. There’s even a whole sixty minute meeting where Mac holds her hand throughout and no one comments on it.

Eventually, they tell Matty and she just waves them off to HR to fill out paperwork. When Mac mentions they have matching soulmarks, one eyebrow raises, and then lowers. “That makes sense,” Matty says, followed by, “Get out of my office and start filling out the paperwork. I’m not kidding. HR needs everything in order before I put you out in the field again and we have a briefing in an hour so _scoot_.”

And so it goes. 

It comes out, of course, that Jack knew. It also comes out that Mac knew for a while before Riley opened up to him about her own soulmark. She’s more upset about Jack than Mac.

She was dating Billy. It wasn’t the right time. What was he supposed to do? He wanted her to be happy. When she opened up to him about her mark, Mac said, he knew it finally _was_ time. 

Riley can’t blame him for that.

She can blame Jack. Which she does, over the phone, for a good half an hour.

“I’m glad you kids figured it out,” he says before they hang up. “It was about time.”

It was past time, maybe, but it doesn’t matter. Jack’s right. They did figure it out. That’s probably the important thing. Riley looks at the mark on her thigh and sees how the black lines seem to glow luminous against her skin. They shine in a way they never have before. Mac’s are the same.

Mac lets himself into her apartment a few hours later with take-out (Chinese), and they spend a lovely evening talking and then making out on the couch like they’re back in high school.

Somewhere in the middle of delighting in the feel of Mac’s body against hers and his mouth on her skin, Riley stands to her feet and holds out her hand. He reaches up, letting his fingers drag down her forearm from the inner crook of her elbow to the tips of her fingers. She takes hold of his hand and tugs lightly, encouraging him to stand to his feet. With hardly a pull on his hand, she backs down the hallway, knowing her apartment so well that she can stare at him while she moves into her bedroom and lets him follow. 

Because she’s not on the rebound. Because they’re not in high school. They’re adults. And she has condoms. And birth control pills.

And her soulmate is right here in front of her, solid and real and _hers_.

He closes the distance between them as they near her bed, wrapping one of his arms around her waist and pulling her in. The kiss that follows is inevitable. It’s heat, and satisfaction, and desire, and coming home. 

In the morning, Riley lies in the golden sunlight streaming through the windows. Beside her, Mac sleeps on his stomach with his head cradled in his arms. His hair is flopped over his forehead, and she brushes it out of his face with her fingers. 

She thinks she loves him. She thinks she always has. She thinks she could let it consume her, burn her up from the inside out. She thinks that might not even be a bad thing. She thinks of infinity, that endless figure eight permanently etched on her thigh. Him and her, forever. Tied permanently together by some invisible string of fate. How unscientific. How cosmic. How inevitable.

Leaning forward, Riley kisses her soulmate on the forehead. His eyes blink open, and a soft smile curves up on his lips before his arm wraps around her waist. Suddenly he’s pulling her close, playfully kissing her neck and pinching at her sides until she’s laughing uncontrollably in his arms and he’s laughing right along with her. 

Fate, Riley Davis thinks to herself, is a lovely thing.

* * *

_end_


End file.
